"A perfectly okay house," indignant Ashleigh informs her sister's friends, "no older than ours and twice as big, and wham! They just knock it down, haul it to the dump, and put up Buckingham Palace instead!"
"More like the Alhambra," in her younger sister's opinion (Tiff's art history course at Fenton includes some architecture as well).
"Or Michael Jackson's Neverland?" offers one of her companions.
"Dad showed us the latest computer projections of it last week?" Ash explains with the rising inflection so popular among her generation. "Ee-e-ew! And he thinks it's just fine!"
"Different people go for different things," her mother reminds them all. "De gustibus non est disputandum?"
"See what I mean?" Tiffany asks her friends, and they seem to, though what it is they see, Judy prefers not to wonder.
"Anyhow," Ashleigh adds, "whatever's right by our dad's boss is fine with our dad."
"Ashleigh! Really!"
Tiffany's exaggerated frown suggests that on this one she sides with her mother, at least in the presence of nonfamily. To Judy's relief, Ashleigh drops the subject, and they finish their bike ride.
Over their early Sunday dinner, however — which Joe, as promised, has returned from Baltimore in time for, before Ashleigh goes back to her dorm — the girl takes up her cudgel again. It's one thing, she declares, to build a big pretentious new house like that eyesore in Rockfish Reach, if that's what a person wants? But to tear down a perfectly okay quote-unquote older one to do it is, in her opinion, downright obscene — like those people who order a full-course restaurant meal and then just nibble at each course, leaving the rest to be tossed out. Gross!
"Weak analogy," her teacher mother can't help pointing out. "Let's think up a better one."
"Like those people who buy a new car every two years?" Tiffany offers. "When their quote old one's in perfectly good condition with maybe ten thousand miles on it?"
"No good," in her sister's opinion, "because at least the old car gets traded in and resold and used. This is more like if every time they buy a new one they junk their perfectly okay old one."
"Good point," Judy approves.
"Or like Saint Mark Matthews," bold Ashleigh presses on, "dumping the mother of his kids for a trophy blond airhead half his age."
Alarmed, Tiffany glances from sister to mother to dad. But Joe, who until now has seemed to Judy still to have city business on his mind, here joins the conversation like the partner she's loved for two dozen years. "Beg to disagree, guys? Not with your analogies, but with your judgment, okay? Because what the heck, Ash: The ranch-house people weren't evicted or dumped; they put their place up for sale and got close to their asking price for it. Seems to me the whole business calls for nothing more than a raised eyebrow — more for the new house's design, if you don't happen to like it, than for the replacement idea itself."
"I think I second that," his wife decides.
"And Mindy Matthews, by the way, is no airhead," Joe informs his daughters. "She's sharp as a tack."
"Hot in bed, too, I bet," Tiffany makes bold to add. Her father frowns disapproval. Judy declares, "That's none of our business, girls."
"But what still gets me, Dad," Ashleigh persists, less belligerently, "is the extravagance of it! We learned in poly sci this week that if Earth's whole human population could be shrunk to a village of exactly one hundred people — with all the same ratios as now? — only thirty of us would be white people, only twenty would live in better than substandard housing, only eight would have some savings in the bank as well as clothes on our back and food in the pantry, and only one of the hundred would have all that plus a college education! And you're telling us that this tear-down thing isn't disgraceful?"
"That's exactly what I'm telling you," her father amiably agrees. "We live in a prosperous free-enterprise country, thank God. Mark Matthews — whom I happen to very much admire — earned his money by brains and hard work, and he and Mindy are entitled to spend it as they damn well please. And their architect, builder, and landscaper are all local outfits, so they'll be putting a couple million bucks into Avon County's economy right there, along with their whopping property taxes down the line." He turns up his palms. "Everybody benefits; nobody gets hurt. So what's your problem, Lefty?"
This last is a family tease of a couple years' standing. Ashleigh Barnes was in fact born left-handed, as was Judy's mother, but the nickname dates from her ever more emphatic liberalism since her fifth- and sixth-form years at Fenton. It's a tendency that her younger sister has lately been manifesting as well, although apart from their mother and a few of Judy's colleagues, the school, it's faculty, and it's students' families are predominantly center-right Republicans.
Her problem, Ashleigh guesses with a sigh, is that she just doesn't like fat cats.
"Mindy Matthews fat?" Tiffany pretends to protest. "She's downright anorexic! Speaking of which," she adds to her father, "at least one person sure got hurt when Saint Mark changed horses: Sharon Matthews." Mindy's predecessor.
Judy looks to her husband with a smile and raised eyebrows, as if to ask, How d'you answer that one? But Joe merely shrugs and says, "With the alimony payments she's getting for the rest of her life, that woman can cry all the way to the bank. So let's enjoy our dinner now, okay?"
His wife sees their daughters give each other their we-give-up look. She does likewise, for the present, and the family returns to enjoying, or at least making the best of, one another's company.
Later that evening, Ashleigh drives back to campus in her hand-me-down Honda Civic, Tiffany busies herself in her room with homework and computer, Judy takes a preliminary whack at the Sunday New York Times crossword puzzle before prepping her Monday lesson plans, Joe scans that newspaper's business section while pondering what Mark Matthews told him that morning en route back from Baltimore in Mark's new Lexus (Mark and his secretary in the front seat, Joe and Jeannine Weston in the rear) and that he hasn't gotten around yet to sharing with Judy — and the new downstairs neighbors' little Yorkshire terrier starts the infernal yip-yipping again that's been driving them batty ever since the Creightons moved into 412 a month ago. They're a pleasant enough younger couple, he an assistant manager at the Stratford GM dealership, she a part-time dietitian at Avon Health Center and busy mother of their four-year-old son. But the kid is noisy and the dog noisier — a far cry from the unit's previous owners! — and although the Creightons respond good-naturedly to the Barneses' tactful complaints, promising to see what if anything they can do about the problem ("You know how it is with kids and pets!"), it gets no better.
He slaps the newspaper down in his lap. "We've got to get out of this fucking place, hon."
"I'm ready." For rich as it is with five years' worth of family memories — the girls' adolescence, their parents' new jobs — the coach home has never really been big enough. No home-office space; no TV/family room separate from the living room; a dining area scarcely large enough to seat six. No guest room even with Ashleigh in the dorm; no real backyard of their own for gardening and barbecuing and such. But the place has, as they'd predicted, substantially appreciated in value, and although any alternative housing will have done likewise, by Joe's reckoning they're "positioned," as he puts it, to move on and up. What Judy would go for is one of the better Oyster Cove villas, a side-by-side duplex instead of over-and-under: three bedrooms, of which one could be her study/workroom and another a combination guest room/den once Tiffany's of to college; a separate family room with adjacent workshop and utility room; and their own small backyard for cookouts, deck lounging, and as much or little gardening as they care to bother with. But what Joe has in mind lately is more ambitious: to buy and renovate one of those older detached houses in Rockfish Reach. A dining room big enough for entertaining friends and colleagues in style, as well as Ash and Tiff and their friends; a real yard and patio; maybe a pool and some kind of outboard runabout to keep at their own private dock. And they should finally cough up the money to join the Heron Bay Club on a golf membership and take up the game, without which one is definitely out of the social scene (so Mark told him, among other things, in the car that morning).